Professor Mikesell is an expert in property and sales taxation, tax administration, and budget processes. He is editor-in-chief of Public Budgeting & Finance and his textbook Fiscal Administration, Analysis and Applications for the Public Sector, in its seventh edition, is a standard textbook in graduate public administration programs.

Professor Mikesell's government finance experience has been both international and domestic. He served as chief fiscal economist / chief of party with the USAID Barents Group / KPMG Peat Marwick fiscal reform project with the Government of Ukraine and as Moscow-based director for assistance in intergovernmental fiscal relations with the USAID Georgia State University Consortium Russian fiscal reform project, has participated on World Bank missions to the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, and has lectured on property taxation at the State Administration of Taxation training academy in China. He directed U. S. Department of State public administration partnerships between the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Volga Region Academy for Civil Service, Saratov, Russia, and the North West Academy for Public Administration, St. Petersburg, Russia. He has worked on fiscal studies for New York, Minnesota, Indiana, and Hawaii and has forecast tax revenue for the state of Indiana for over thirty years.

Professor Mikesell has been visiting scholar at the U. S. Congressional Budget Office and at the Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam and held a David Lincoln Fellowship in Land Value Taxation with the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy from 2005 through 2007. He received the 2002 Wildavsky Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in Public Budgeting and Finance from the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.

Professor Mikesell holds a BA from Wabash College (elected to Phi Beta Kappa) and MA and PhD in economics from the University of Illinois.